Local opinion: Stop demonizing the public majority, data center gaslighting isn’t growth

Some of your neighbors, and maybe even you, received shade thrown by Arizona House Representative Justin Wilmeth here last week, who likened folks challenging data centers to a lynch mob. I’m one of countless Americans calling for data center moratoriums, and I refute Wilmeth’s attack on my objection to predatory tech.

Despite people's obliged dependence on digital compute for everything from transportation and banking to family photos, the internet was not only alive and well before the data center boom, but its footprint is largely wasted by advertising and bots. Data center buildout is for AI — not to maintain the web.

However, Wilmeth is correct in saying data centers are easy to demonize. Ask the Pope. Or ask the UN, which worries AI infrastructure may violate the Geneva Conventions by developing military targets in civilian areas — a serious risk considering the decimation of US defense stockpiles and exploitation of U.S. service members for acts of repeated perfidy and ongoing civilian slaughter. Not to mention a tandem concern, that anyone can get an NVIDIA Jetson chip off Amazon and AI-hack it onto a drone, constructing a guided bomb.

Recently on National Security Law Today, the founding Director of the DOD’s first operational AI program, Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, cited “cognitive surrender" in US soldiers executing kills targeted with AI. He said, “We have a transparency problem on all sides. We need to be very open about how these things are going to affect society broadly speaking, jobs, but also how we fight, win, or lose wars.”

Competition in AI-enabled psychological operations between great and rising powers is also worrisome, but I didn’t get to my views by cashing a Chinese check, as Representative Wilmeth suggested. Perhaps he has a hard time imagining people going to bat for something without any pay-for-play, considering his biggest donors include the political action committees of AI industry goliaths like Intel, JPMorgan, and Raytheon, several of the largest Arizona utility corporations, the Arizona Tech Council of defense contractors, the utilities/data center/automation real estate firm NAIOP, and one of the largest contractors for ICE human-tracking and detention in America — the GEO Group.

Uncontrolled AI development is the epitome of elitism, and AI industrialists show no remorse for its staggering collateral damage. They are too busy betting on resource grabs, weapons procurement, and domestic surveillance.

Although Wilmeth is a Republican, AI industrialists pay both ways, as with Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, who across his legislative positions, has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from weapons industry PACs and executives — and who has ignored voters’ AI-related transparency inquiries, including my own. In Pima County, the three officials who greenlit the Project Blue data center are no better. Supervisors Matt Heinz, Christy Scott, and Rex Scott took money from principals of the firm that acted as a real estate partner to the company behind Project Blue.

“Make America Visionary Again,” Representative Wilmeth quipped in his attack, notching off “conquering the Moon.”

Yet, most of us see the moon as a reminder we share the same sky with people and places we love, not as an object we "conquered". It’s egoists like Wilmeth, Gallego, Heinz, and both Scotts who squandered half a century of international trust and American ingenuity, above all on a colossal and increasingly bloody dime. A visionary recovery requires visionary leaders, not kleptocrats.

Last month, a member of Tucson’s No Desert Data Center coalition (NDDCC), elegantly dressed in the traditional tunic and trousers of his heritage, and honoring the history of saying no to treatment based on money or other privilege, asked the Pima Supervisors who chose greed over civic duty to resign. He then gracefully sat atop the citizens' lectern for a few moments in protest.

Officials who betray the groundswell of such democratic actions — throwing us under the bus of a predatory AI buildout — should indeed resign.

Late June at Purple Heart Park, the NDDCC will serve pancakes, not “torches and pitchforks”, to anyone wanting to learn about data centers — from the tanking of resources, jobs, and property values to jacking up heat, noise, and utility costs. Follow NDDCC for details.